The Importance of Owning Your Audience-Why It Matters and How to Do It

I have run 3 different businesses, worked in professional sales of insurance and more recently SaaS and the single hardest thing to achieve across any of these roles has been direct access to customers. All the clever marketing strategies in the world won’t do much good if a direct line of communication with your customer is non-existent. The key to accomplishing this is focusing your time on activities that drive 1:1 communication.

My wife runs a direct sales business selling those ever so comfy leggings from LuLaRoe. Many of these retailers, like her, were raking in the dough until Facebook changed their news feed algorithm and drastically affected her business. I realized in very short order that she didn’t own as much of her audience as I thought. My wife had almost 10,000 members in our Facebook VIP group, however, less than one third of those were customers that she had emails for. Let’s just say after that algorithm changed, sales were down and it changed our focus to owning her audience.

So what are the best forms of direct access? We all know that email is the high king of direct access to your audience. However, you can send a text, phone a friend, or hey, here is a novel idea; how about Facebook Messenger! Facebook’s Messenger app gives you direct contact with your customer, it pops up little notifications that any Facebook addict won’t be able to stop checking and you can call them from right in the app. The best part is there are Messenger Bots, www.manychat.com, that can automate the process of owning this part of your audience and keeping them engaged with your business.

So why is owning your audience imperative?

You are insulated from social media companies like Facebook changing their algorithm or terms of service.

You can segment your list into groups so you can send tailored messages to specific groups.

You can measure the results of messages with: A/B testing, click through rate, and purchase metrics.

Finally, with so many people becoming truly mobile device addicted, people are checking their emails, texts and mobile messaging platforms all the time — in line at Starbucks, during their office commute, in the waiting room of any office, at the grocery store, everywhere.

After 2 months of testing and promotion with my wife’s business we have been able to capture 3231 email subscribers and 338 Facebook Messenger Bot, www.manychat.com, subscribers. Through emails we have been able to keep our customers engaged with special offers and schedule of events each week. The manychat bot has helped us average 38 viewers per live over the last 14 live events and to date we have sold 109 items during those lives representing $4,578 dollars in revenue. Our average items sold per live is 7.78, viewer to purchase rate of 20.5% and $42 per item sold. When you do the math a tenth (1,037) of the subscribers to our Facebook VIP Group, we stand to generate $1,000 dollars per live and that doesn’t even consider the outfit upsell method that we employ after the live sale is over.

I hope this article has opened your eyes to see how direct 1:1 communication is the lifeblood of any business and that establishing a process for your own business to capture this direct access to your customers is imperative. “Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.”, add a strategy to capture your audience’s permission to communicate directly and your hustle won’t leave much behind for those who wait.

If you are using some tools to capture direct access to your customer comment below and let’s share some more strategies own your audience.